While there are number of songs and specific Britney lyrics that feel decidedly all “too real” now (including the evermore problematic “I’m A Slave 4 U”), one of the most noticeably relevant ones to the oppressed pop star’s current situation is 2000’s “Lucky” from Spears’ sophomore album, Oops!…I Did It Again. Built up to with an interlude that precedes the track and concludes “What U See (Is What U Get),” a Britney suitor leaves a message on her answering machine (the one that says, “Hi what’s up? This is Brit, and I’m not in right now, so do yo thang! Beep! [giggles] I’m just kiddin’.”) offering, “Yo Brit, you’re a nerd. You really need to change that message. Look, I was thinkin’ about that movie we saw the other night. You know, how she had all that fame, and all that money—and she still wasn’t happy. Wouldn’t that make a cool song?”
Cue the doo-wop meets 50s teen pop-inspired opening notes to the now forever haunting “Lucky” (which, again, should really serve as the opening song to the Academy Awards). Apart from being arguably the most philosophical pop song of the twenty-first-century, it now also applies to the state of constant dissatisfaction Britney feels despite appearing to “have everything.” Or, at least, told that she does by her “handlers.” To boot, Britney still seems trapped enough in time to believe that the majority really was continuing to buy in to the idea of her “fairy tale” career and lifestyle.
But any doubt left was shattered when Spears wrote on her Instagram after her June 23rd testimony regarding her conservatorship, “I don’t want people to think my life is perfect because IT’S DEFINITELY NOT AT ALL.” Let one just interject to say that most people haven’t thought anything of the kind in quite a while. Not since around the “Lucky” era, as a matter of fact, before the media scrutiny started to really intensify—including the now famed Diane Sawyer interview from 2003 during which the “esteemed” journalist spends the majority of the time asking Britney why she doesn’t wear more clothes.
And yet, Britney being so insulated and accustomed to putting on her “show(wo)man’s” face all the time, probably does genuinely believe she’s been “fooling” everyone for this long. Thus, she continues, “…and if you have read anything about me in the news this week… you obviously really know now it’s not!!!! I apologize for pretending like I’ve been ok the past two years… I did it because of my pride and I was embarrassed to share what happened to me…” Spears expressed a similar embarrassment in the wake of the Framing Britney Spears documentary that many believe served as a major catalyst for putting a bigger spotlight on the injustices of this conservatorship, therefore “granting” Spears the opportunity to finally speak some modicum of the truth after thirteen years.
Regarding her sense of pride as it ties into being humiliated by the depth of her shackling situation, it harkens back to a Making the Video for “Lucky” itself, during which she said, “I hate it when celebrities talk about how depressing their lives are. I wouldn’t change my life for anything, I’m so happy with what I’m doing, but I’m human. And just like everybody else out there, I have depressing moments.” One imagines she does, however, definitely want to change her life now, for she had no idea just how many depressing moments were to come in the wake of “Lucky,” almost as though putting the lyrics of this song out into the universe were bound to conjure something of a manifest destiny. Among those verses including, “Early morning, she wakes up/Knock, knock, knock on the door/It’s time for makeup, perfect smile It’s you they’re all waiting for.”
In the pre-conservatorship days, the “they” might have been her public, but now, it is all those human instruments of her father, Jamie Spears. To the point of having to look and “be” perfect, there was a moment during Spears’ testimony during which she bemoaned the state of her “precious body, who has worked for my dad for the past fucking thirteen years, trying to be so good and pretty. So perfect.” Well, she simply can’t anymore. For, like Lucky, she has cried for too long in her lonely heart. Indeed, there are numerous mentions of Spears’ heart throughout the transcript, including, “I don’t even drink alcohol—I should drink alcohol, considering what they put my heart through” and “I want to be able to be heard on what they did to me by making me keep this in for so long, it is not good for my heart.”
The pressures of fame, intermixed with the expectations people have for a star of Spears’ caliber to be able to work like a machine, further conjured parallels to Lucky and not having “the right” to be in a bad mood or second guess the “value” of her fame as Spears told the judge, “Ma’am, I’ve worked since I was seventeen years old [side bar: she’s been working even longer than that]. You have to understand how thin that is for me every morning I get up to know I can’t go somewhere unless I meet people I don’t know every week…” In this moment, the frazzled, “vexed” persona of Lucky comes into play when the metaphorical clapperboard comes down and the director yells, “Cut.” An irritated Lucky snipes, “Finally, we’ve done it fifty million times!” One imagines this was how Britney felt after endless scores of rehearsals and show dates for the Piece of Me residency, during which having to perform “I’m A Slave 4 U” (a song she’s included in every tour since Dream Within A Dream) must have been particularly excruciating. And yes, she was sure to mention she was no one’s slave during the hearing. Alas, with this single being one of her biggest hits, she appears to have branded herself for life. At least in “Daddy’s” eyes.
More Lucky vibes radiated when she described to the judge that, this entire time, she’s just been putting up a front, admitting, “I’m telling you this again two years later, after I’ve lied and told the whole world, ‘I’m okay and I’m happy.’ It’s a lie. I thought maybe if I said that enough maybe I might become happy, because I’ve been in denial. I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized. You know, fake it till you make it. But now I’m telling you the truth, okay? I’m not happy. I can’t sleep. I’m so angry it’s insane. And I’m depressed. I cry every day.” This is when we hear the surrender of Lucky herself during the breakdown of the song as she sings, “I-I-I cry-eye-eye” as the announcer on the red carpet excitedly narrates her approach (with an Oscar in hand). As the chaos and commotion swirls around her, so, too, do we get a vague sense of Spears’ own life—not just at the height of her fame, but as her conservatorship began and continued to wear on. Waking up, early morning, to be greeted by a team of “aids” expecting, even now, her perfection when the entire reason she was pushed into a conservatorship was because of just how “imperfect” she had become.
Spears even mentioned another “Lucky” of the 00s, Paris Hilton, when she explained her hesitation in being honest with the world about her grim reality, decoding, “It’s embarrassing and demoralizing what I’ve been through. And that’s the main reason I’ve never said it openly. And mainly, I didn’t want to say it openly, because I honestly don’t think anyone would believe me. To be honest with you, the Paris Hilton story on what they did to her to that that school, I didn’t believe any of it. I’m sorry. I’m an outsider, and I’ll just be honest. I didn’t believe it.” She continued her statement in a manner befitting of someone who responsible for bringing “Lucky” into the pop pantheon, adding, “And maybe I’m wrong, and that’s why I didn’t want to say any of this to anybody, to the public, because I thought people would make fun of me or laugh at me and say, ‘She’s lying, she’s got everything, she’s Britney Spears.’” In other words, she was afraid “they [would] go, ‘Isn’t she lovely, this Hollywood girl?’ And they say, ‘She’s so lucky, she’s a star.” For Spears herself came from a place of imagining that nothing could be better than achieving the “perks” of celebrity—most notably, money. Money she can’t even take ownership of, alas.
As for one of the lyrics that might not apply to Spears’ situation at the moment, “And the world is spinning, and she keeps on winning/But tell me, what happens when it stops?” it still rather works in the context of her continuing to win public favor. Which, if it ever miraculously stopped, would indeed not bode well for her ability to bust loose.
Asking the most philosophical question of the song, “If there’s nothing missing in my life, then why do these tears come at night?,” it’s as though Spears foreshadowed the extent of her isolated, confining existence—with nothing and no one to turn to or trust. Everyone in her orbit always secretly wanting something from her, trying to position some angle to milk her of her hard-earned cash. And thus, “Lucky” is a song that foretold, in ways grimmer than Britney and her songwriters could have imagined, just how detrimental fame could really be to a person’s heart and soul.
